I would ask my friendly 5th District police bureau, but unfortunately I think I am permanently on Officer Addison's shitlist at this point. She responded to a call from my address last night around 9:30pm, only to find me and my ragamuffin friends eating couscous and drinking gin on the front porch. Some might call this undesirable street hooliganry; I call it "neighborhood watch."

When I explained the situation - that I suspected my neighbor had smeared macaroni and cheese all over my car - I really thought the officer was going to slap me. And I couldn't have blamed her.

I retold the history of harassment, explaining that we knew that if we didn't catch our neighbor in the act, the police couldn't really do anything. Eventually I got my police report (it has the wrong street name on it, but hey, nobody's perfect), with a number for follow-up inquiries.

But I'm getting competing advice from one of our other (black) neighbors, who instructed us to pay a "big black thug" fifty dollars to go over and threaten the problem neighbor. After all, she said, "there's not much you can't accomplish if you give fifty dollars to a black man." Amen?